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Friday, May 17, 2013

The Slow Reveal: My fight against Homo and Trans* Phobia

To find linky-dinky goodness and the ease of having the whole hop at the tips of your fingers, take a trip (or a click) on over to the Hop's homepage... Right Here for the Hop Go on. Click it. You know you wanna...

Today is the first day of a ten day blog hop extravaganza dedicated to helping eradicate homophobia and transphobia. This is my little contribution... So, there should be prizes in a hop, right? Okay. So in honor of the hop, my winner gets to pick which charity (and it has to be one serving the LGBT community) they want me to donate 10% of my earnings for the last three quarters of 2013 to. I'll send statements, receipts from the charity of their choice... and in addition, they get a book of their choice from my backlist. What about entering to win the prize? Um, easy peasy. Just leave a comment here on the blog.Notification? Please check back on the blog. I'll announce the winner here on the 28th of this month.

Also, while you are here, be sure to take a peek over here: International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (May 17th) You can find there link right here: http://dayagainsthomophobia.org

All right, then without further ado, here's my little offering. :) Enjoy.

*************************************************

Prologue~
Tuesday

Jules came on Tuesdays
without fail. At precisely four o’clock in the afternoon, he arrived to read to
William from books they discussed with one another back when William could
still talk. Though the last stroke changed William’s ability to converse
coherently, they both still treasured their time together with one another and
their favorite paper friends. So now, Jules read, and William listened with
varying degrees of patience tempered only by his delight in watching Jules move
lightly around his room like an energetic brown and gold wagtail bird. When leaning
forward in his seat as though John Donne’s words held the elixir of life and he
could breathe health back into William simply by shaping the words well enough,
Jules was maddening. He made something sly and devious in William want to howl
and yip at the indignity of his disobedient body.

Jules’s stylishly cut brown
hair flopped over his forehead each time he tossed his head restively. The
artfully placed streaks of light blond suited him very well. William exhaled as
he wished, yet again, he could tell Jules
how much the new splashes of color suited him. A mass of tangled feelings flooded
up through William’s guts with the do or die insistence of earthworms pushing
up through soil growing rapidly too wet for comfort only to lose their tiny
lives to the puddles of a rainy day. As always, when he finally settled Jules
sat parallel to the bed, in a battered old armchair whose color was so dimed
with age and use it might well have been brown or green or lemon yellow—there
was no telling now. He sat, relaxed as if in his own ruthlessly immaculate
kitchen—and William knew full well how Jules kept his kitchen from stories told
and years’ worth of pictures shared.

***********************************

Right now, you’re shaking your head and wondering
what that snippet of a story has to do with hopping against homophobia or
transphobia. It’s pretty a simple answer. Jules is trans*. William is gay.

Yeah, but those things aren’t in the snip I shared
are they?

Nope. They aren’t. In fact the general reader, the
one that didn’t travel around this hop checking out the posts isn’t going to be
aware that Jules is trans* until after the second book in the series comes out.
And in the first book, especially in the early section, they’ll be confronted with
William’s struggles with life or death health issues—and no, he does not have
HIV—long before any issues directly related to his sexuality play a major role
in his story.

Why you ask?

Life happens that way. You meet people every day,
and most of the time you don’t get a big slice of their life story right off
the bat. Every now and again you might, especially if the stranger on the train
you’re talking to is me, but most of the time you get tiny slivers of insight.
Getting to know new people takes time, and by the time you find out they’re
trans* or gay or into making really strange and somewhat disturbing clay art
you’ve had time to know a lot about the person they are. You found out
something about their sexuality, or an odd-ball hobby where they spend hours
sculpting tiny peapods devouring a person at a vaguely Thanksgiving holiday style
event… you didn’t however, just stumble over evidence that they systematically
kidnap young children to torture and kill. You didn’t get socked with them
actually having dozens of aliases they use to defraud vulnerable elderly
people, leaving them destitute. You especially didn’t discover that they are
the next infamous serial killer of people EXACTLY like you. So I’m still
baffled about the fear. Any decision you make at that point about how you are
going to view them is just that, a decision. There’s a lot of reliable information
available these days, to anyone who cares to take the time to look for it,
about what being homosexual or transgender really is or isn’t.

Fear?

Huh. I don’t think so. More like an asp you’re
deliberately snuggling with. I’d rethink that if I were you, hon. Look what
happened to Cleopatra.

Now that is a prize I can totally get behind! Nicely done Cherie! And thanks for being one of the organizers of this year's hop. You already have my contact info, so I'm not worried about that. Hope all is good with you. :D

*squishes you tight* Love this post, Cherie! It's funny how Jules and William seem like normal people...because they are. Very poignant example that the way you think of people is always a choice. Fabulous post! And a fabulous prize as well. Thanks for sharing. :)

Your excerpt made me think about my son who came out as transgender male last year. He's still technically a female although he now has a beard from his T shots. I wonder how, when he meets someone --male or female, how the issue of gender will come up. I know there's nothing I can do, but I do wonder how that will go. I hate the thought of him getting hurt.

Lena, as a person who has dated trans* people, it will depend largely on his own attitude about being trans*. It's not something ever ever to be ashamed of. Unfortunately there will be people out there who will be unkind, and I'm sure at some point he will be hurt, but that is the risk everyone takes no matter orientation or gender identity when it comes to love. You are a wonderful mother! <3

Most people who "fear" homosexuality are either just ignorant, afraid of their own sexuality (if it becomes okay to be gay, then should they allow themselves to think about those unnatural "urges"?), or just plain stupid. I say stupid because people who follow teachings blindly without question aren't using their brains. They don't evaluate evidences, they just take things at face value because somebody says so. Of course, some people have been brought up in a way that makes it impossible for them to think for themselves and I truly do feel for them, but I will continue to try to help change their minds.

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